


The Goal is the Thing

by dreamiflame



Category: American Gods - Neil Gaiman
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-12-16
Updated: 2006-12-16
Packaged: 2018-01-25 05:24:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,578
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1633766
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dreamiflame/pseuds/dreamiflame
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Loki, before and during.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Goal is the Thing

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Kati-Lara](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=Kati-Lara).
  * Translation into Русский available: [Главное - цель](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5020474) by [sige_vic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sige_vic/pseuds/sige_vic)



> Thank you to my beta crantz on livejournal for handholding, encouragement, and general positive energy. He says to say any mistakes left are his fault for being drunk, but we all know they're actually probably mine.

Odin finished counting out the two piles and handed one to Loki. Though he had been sitting next to Odin (had, in fact, been counting right along, patiently impatient), Loki rifled through it, checking one more time. Sticky fingers, and all that, and Odin wasn't known for his honesty.

It wasn't a bad haul, considering. But it was only money, and Loki felt tired as he tucked away the stack of crisp, green bills. The cons were the easy part. Stealing was easy. But no one was telling the stories anymore, and that was wearing on him. On both of them.

What he wouldn't give for a little chaos, though. A sacrifice would be preferable, but Loki would take what he could get. Just a tiny smidgen of absolute insanity, that would ease the ache in his head, in his shoulders, everywhere. He hurt all over now, constantly. And if the number of virgins Odin was going through on a weekly basis was any indication, he wasn't the only one hurting.

But what could they do? He nodded to the sign of a bar, asking Odin without words if he wanted a drink. To celebrate them, their partnership, the wealth they had just separated from a fool who couldn't tell the difference between a real fiddle and a fake one. And Odin, who had never turned down a drink, free or otherwise, if he thought he could con his way out of the bill, nodded back, following him into the smoky darkness.

They ordered whiskey, and Loki pulled out a half finished pack of cigarettes, crumpled now, tobacco drifting into his pocket from the open end. He offered one to Odin, who took it with a slight grimace of distaste, and felt around his pockets for a pack of matches.

Failing that, he turned to the stranger on his left. "Got a light?" he asked, and recieved barely a grunt in response before the man, well on his way to being drunk, if Loki was any judge, tossed him a mostly empty pack of matches. Loki took them and lit his cigarette, then Odin's, letting the match burn down to his fingertips after. It hurt for barely a moment, a different sort of pain than the dull ache he lived with all the time.

Odin tossed back his drink, slamming the glass back onto the bar. "Another," he commanded the bartender, and the man poured him another, none of the proper words spoken or even thought of before he had moved on to the next customer. Loki swirled the whiskey in his glass around and around and tried not to think so much.

"This has to end," Odin said, startling him, and Loki looked at his blood-brother, his arch enemy. When they drank, sometimes they would talk, about the old days, glory and praise and blood, nothing important. Not the death of Odin's son at Loki's hand, nor Loki's long, bitter stay under the earth, burned by venom and tended only by his silent, shrinking wife. Nothing that painful. Only things that they lacked here, in this inhospitable land, where the coldness of Norway was put to shame by far.

But Odin wasn't drunk yet, not on something so paltry as one glass of liquor, and his eye was too sharp, too focused to be looking back onto happier times. "What has to?" Liquid swirled round and round in Loki's glass, and the smoke from the cigarette rose and made shapes in the dim light.

"This... famine," Odin spat out, and drank his second whiskey as he had the first. His wide, sweeping gesture encompassed the bar and more, the whole town, state, country. "We have nothing here. There has to be a way to get more worship, more power."

Loki took a sip of his drink and tried not to make a face. None of this human liquor was as good as that which had been served in Odin's hall, nor what he had drunk in the land of the giants. "This is a bad country for our kind," he said, lighting himself a new cigarette from the butt of the old one. This one he proceeded to raise to his lips, letting the smoke curl up around his head, almost as though it were off an offering, something or someone burned in his name. It wasn't the same, not even close. The barest echo of a full symphony, perhaps. "I would be content with a war of some kind, conflict-"

Odin's hand closed hard on his arm, the old man so much stronger than he looked. "A war," he said, eye glittering, and even the glass one had the illusion of life in the reflected light off the wall behind the bar. "If we could start a war-"

\---

That was the beginning, in a smoky, nameless bar after a job well done. There were snags, of course, in the process of putting the con together: what they really needed, more than anything, was a distraction. Someone to make everyone look the other way while Loki and Odin put the whole con together. Once, perhaps, they would have prevailed upon Thor, telling him just enough to get him to cooperate, but never too much that he might catch on and demand to be cut in. Odin would get the power of course, and Loki, well, the level of chaos Odin's plan would generate would be enough to keep him healthy and young for centuries.

But they still didn't have the straight man, the empty hand to make everyone focus on. Then one night in the seventies, Odin called Loki, excitement practically dancing along the line between them. "A son!" he cried, and Loki scoffed, for when was the last time the old man had managed to shoot anything more than a blank? It was probably just the influence of all the drugs in the systems at the places Odin liked to frequent, trawling for virgins.

And then the child was born, and Loki had to admit to being wrong. A son, then. It could work, raise the boy to help his father, and by proxy, Loki himself (Odin's eyes, both of them, had been very stern when he stared at Loki. "No killing this one. We need him." And tempting though the thought might be, the idea of power, real, actual power, after so very long with scraps and tatters, was enough for Loki to agree wholeheartedly).

Of course, just when they were moving in to take the infant, he disappeared with his mother. Their influence only extended as far as the shores of America herself, and no further, and for many more years, the plot lingered, becoming nothing more than another wistful dream of Odin's that Loki had been dragged into.

It was accident that rediscovered Odin's son, an offhand comment about an offhand comment, passed from a friend of a friend of a friend, and there he was. In jail, because none of Odin's sons had the sense given to rocks, but that could work to their advantage as well. It would keep him in one place long enough for Loki to sound him out, though the indignity of being careless enough in his hustling that the human authorities caught on was almost more than he could bear.

Equally as galling was just how badly he had to act for them to notice. Loki had been trying to get picked up for hustling for over a month before someone finally took notice. It was sad, the way he had overestimated the intelligence of those responible for keeping the law in this day and age.

"And this will be your new cellmate," said the guard, and Loki smiled, feeling the scars pull at his lips.

\---

They didn't plan on this, though. They planned the death, the martyrdom ("What better way to unite the older ones than to give them a martyr?" Odin's smile was something wicked and dirty, and Loki knew the grin on his own face had to be just about the same. What, indeed?), the distraction, everything.

Everything except that blasted leprachaun giving Shadow the wrong type of coin and the thrice-blasted boy giving it foolishly away to his dear, departed wife. And now Loki had a problem, and a corpse with a stick of wood from the Yggsdrasil. A corpse with a stick that he needed, and a mind of her own, and a body newly regenerated by the waters of Urd's well.

Some days an honest conman just couldn't catch a break. Then she stabbed him through her back, through her be-damned body, and Loki had even more to worry about. The pain flared, agony such as he hadn't felt in eons- dedicated to _Shadow_ , for the love of God! _His_ death! Where was the justice in that?- and he roared, shaking himself and her and falling, falling what seemed like forever, and landing on the rock floor with her pinned atop him. The spear held, as it would, given the material it was made of, and Loki forced himself to think through the pain in his chest. Get the dead woman off of him, that was the first thing.

Then the spear. He stood, shaking badly, and he knew as sure as he knew that one day the wolf would eat the sun that his aim was off, but direction didn't matter. What mattered was the power, the dedication.

"-to Odin!"


End file.
